THE AUFA PRESIDENT COMMUNICATES

 

It may be perennially “twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play” but as of July 15, 2006 it will have been thirty years since the Acadia University Faculty Association was established.  That gives us a staying power not only better than the Beatles, but also Pink Floyd, The Who, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, and just about any other rock ‘n’ roll band.  (The obvious exception to this being the Stones, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that AUFA will ultimately out-last even those pop culture icons.)  And while it may seem a stretch to discuss AUFA’s staying power in the context of rock ‘n’ roll, perhaps it is an analogy more apt than initially appears.

 

The enduring strength of rock music is its ability to re-invent itself time and again.  From the early 1950s until now, rock has undergone as many face lifts and rhythmical transplants as necessary to stay vital.  Similarly, AUFA regularly re-invents itself through the introduction into the membership of new members with new ideas and priorities that differ from those of existing or previous members.  We have recently experienced the most profound such renaissance I have seen during my five short years at Acadia.  I have no idea how often such tremors shake our foundation, but I am very pleased that our collective will to continue, and our collective recognition that we are stronger together, have enabled the structure to survive despite the sound and fury raised by some against your elected executive’s decision to endorse an action that, if common-place elsewhere, is new and different in Acadia’s context.  Because I believe every one of us has the right to articulate her or his concern over the new and different—just as we all have a right, though in my opinion it is too seldom exercised, to express concern over the old and familiar—I am glad we had the recent chance to test the strength of what we’ve built together against both the infusion of new ideas and the maintenance of tradition.

 

For AUFA to survive another thirty years it must re-vitalize itself from time to time, as circumstances dictate.  The recent sound and fury give us an opportunity to start thinking about at least one area to which I think it is crucial we give considerable thought about how we do things.  I name this area not only because of recent events, but because in my three years as a member of the executive of AUFA it is far and away the most common cause of complaints I have heard from members.

 

The area to which AUFA members need to devote time, intellectual energy, and vigorous debate over the next year, as we celebrate our 30th anniversary and prepare to negotiate our 12th Collective Agreement, is the area of renewal, tenure, and promotion (RTP).  These facets of our careers are governed by Article 12 of the Collective Agreement, and for most of us the most important feature of that article is that it articulates a process whereby we are judged by colleagues rather than administrators.  I suspect that some of the fervent support one encounters for Article 12 originates in the mistaken belief that there are only two, stark choices for RTP: ‘Either we stay with what we’ve got, or we give up control to a Dean’s Council.’  This is a false dichotomy.  We can retain faculty control of the RTP process, and also change the process in ways that enable the membership to regain its faith that the RTP process at Acadia is fair.  We can establish a process that enables applicants to know what is required of them because it articulates what is required in specific terms.  Such specificity is provided and applied elsewhere, and it could be here, too.  What we must achieve is an RTP process that recognizes, and is seen to recognize, that promotion is not a special reward but is part of a natural academic career path.

 

I do not pretend to have the answers to this problem.  I know, from conversations here and with academics elsewhere, that ours is not the only way, and that we need not choose between what we have and relinquishing control to non-members.  I know that too many AUFA members lack faith in Article 12, or its application, currently.  I do not know that this lack of faith is justified, but I do know that ignoring it will lead us neither to a restoration of our collective faith nor a resolution of possibly real problems.  What I think we should do is start discussing Article 12 and the entire RTP process so that we can identify common problems and common concerns across as broad a spectrum of the membership as possible.  We can also look at how things are done elsewhere, and consider improving our RTP process by adopting elements of what is done elsewhere into what we already do well here.  We might consider adopting quantifiable, discipline-specific, measures so that a person can achieve promotion when certain benchmarks are reached, rather than when they have been in rank a “normal” length of time or when they compare favourably to others who only happen to apply in the same cohort.

 

I know that members of the URC work very hard in all aspects of the RTP process, and I am sure that this is nowhere more true than in their struggle to interpret the concept of “consistency” called for in Article 12.  I may be wrong, but I strongly suspect that this idea of “consistency” makes the job of the URC harder than it needs to be, and is the source—directly or indirectly—of many of the concerns of the membership.  Ordinarily, I prefer language that is open to interpretation, because I have more faith in people’s abilities to judge fairly in a given circumstance than I do in anyone’s ability to compose a document that will provide all necessary answers in any conceivable circumstance.  But the RTP process is so central to our professional lives, and to our increasingly urgent need to recruit and retain competitively, that I would be willing to consider relinquishing interpretive freedom for greater clarity in direction and expectation.

 

Such is my faith in the resiliency of AUFA and its members that I am confident we can find a better way to ensure our hard work at Acadia counts as much as it would at another university.  Like rock ‘n’ roll, to stay vital AUFA must respond to changes in the larger culture.  Since the early 1970s Canadian academics have counted themselves among the blessed to get a university job, and lateral movement on the Canadian academic scene has been almost non-existent.  Canadian academic culture is no longer so static because the academic job is no longer such a rarity, and because increasingly Ph.D.s recognize that regardless of discipline they are statistically likely to earn more outside the academy than inside it; so to attract and keep good people on Acadia’s faculty we are going to have to re-invent our workplace as one in which academic labour here is valued on par with similar work done elsewhere.

Richard Cunningham

President, AUFA

 

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